In Windows 8 you can use the Windows Media Player and Music apps to keep all of your tracks in order

In Windows 8 you can use the Windows Media Player and Music apps to keep all of your tracks in order

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A few years ago keeping your entire music collection on your laptop or PC seemed like hard work, but with the capacity of modern hard drives it’s perfectly feasible to have every music track you own available all the time. Of course, thanks to Xbox Music and other music subscription services you can have millions of tracks available wherever there’s an internet connection to stream the music too.

Music collections can run in to the tens of thousands of tracks even for a modest user and keeping on top of all those files is tricky. Of course, in Windows 8 you can use the Windows Media Player and Music apps to keep the actual files and folders in order, but to put the audio in some semblance of listenable order you do need to take some manual control. Happily the process of making music playlists is easy enough no matter which app you choose to use.

In the Music app that you’ll find pinned to the Windows 8 Start screen you can stream music or listen to your own albums of tracks stored in your Music library. To create your own playlists click on My Music and then on playlists. When the window opens click on Create new playlist and type in an appropriate name and then Save. Now you can click on Browse my albums to add tracks to your playlist. In Windows Media Player you can do much the same, but with a lot more control over what is added. With Windows Media Player open click on Create playlist > Create auto playlist. With the New Auto Playlist window open you can add a host of criteria to filter your music. Choose to include music from a single artist or by the rating you’ve given, you can even create a playlist based on the number of times a track has been played on a weekday or weekend.

Managing music might seem a trifle dull, but when you’ve taken the time to create your perfect playlists it’ll be much easier to manage and listen to your favourite tracks.